Posts by ejoftheweb

"most of us accept that..."

If "most of us" do, "most of us" have been duped. Perhaps someone's been saying that if we have nothing to hide we have nothing to fear? No government that hides any truth from its citizens can ever be trusted with any of its citizens' secrets, but at least there is some kind of framework of accountability, however flawed, for our security services. Not so for RIM.

RIM promises security, but it will betray its customers to the security services of the states it approves of at its own, unaccountable whim.

I'm glad I don't have a Blackberry; nothing I've read about this case encourages me to get one. On the other hand, I have decided to install the Android Privacy Guard, an OpenPGP implementation on my Android phone.

Er yes but

First, is the Kola dataset published? If not, no one has learned anything from climategate.

Second, it's only a very small series from a part of the arctic. Solar activity might or might not be implicated, but if it were, I'd expect to see correlations over much more than a single cycle. Should be possible using tree rings to go back at least 500 years and see correlations with solar minima and maxima, if it is indeed the cause. If this variation is only seen for the 1935-1990 period, I'd look much more closely at industrial pollution - soot and sulphate aerosols - as a possible explanation: the period of the cooling seems to me to match fairly closely the maximum period of industrial activity in the region. I'm not saying it is, mind: I'm just saying that's what should be checked, and if the scientists are just using this short series to make the claim for solar activity I would also look very, very closely at who's paying them.

official name for the coalition

Not so draconian

Compulsory chipping of dogs is a great idea, since most responsible dog owners would do it anyway. The chip is about the size of a grain of rice and is inserted by a vet without anaesthetic; it's no more painful than getting a shot. The chip readers are widely available and will get cheaper; they're small and the police in areas where dogs-as-weapons are common could carry them. Any unchipped dog in public should be destroyed.

However the number on the chip would need to be linked to a dog-ownership database - currently the data is held by vets, but the police and dog wardens would need appropriate access. This could be done simply and cheaply by specifying a protocol and an API to make use of the existing distributed database or we could give large amounts of money to HP, Accenture or Capita to design and run a single, late, broken consolidated one. Guess which is most likely.

Compulsory insurance is just another way of giving more money to the financial services sector, so that''s probably more of a runner than compulsory chipping.

A case for transparency, not against the ACCH

The various errors are stronger evidence yet of the case for full transparency in scholarship. No reputable journal should ever publish a paper without linking to the full raw data, in every discipline not just climate science.

But do they amount to evidence against the ACCH (anthropogenic climate change hypothesis)? no, not one bit. They may weaken the evidence for the hypothesis, but that's a long way from being evidence against it.

From what I've seen, the most convincing evidence is in the Greenland icecore series, which show a strong, lagging correlation between atmospheric CO2 and global temperatures (the latter inferred in the icecore from markers such as the species mix in pollen). On that timescale (0.5mya), vulcanism was the main contributor to CO2. But we now have rising CO2 concentrations, similar to those shown in the Greenland data, and it's clear that these rises are anthropogenic, with deforestation the largest contributor. What's much less clear is whether these rising CO2 concentrations have yet had a significant impact on climate. Hansen's latest view is that the current indicators, such as the retreat of Himalayan glaciers, may well be due more to other pollutants, in particular soot - again, mostly coming from deforestation.